Ticket price forecasting for live events

Seat Geek is a free service that helps users find tickets when they’re cheapest. Currently focused on Major League Baseball games and select concerts in the US, Seat Geek employs a sophisticated algorithm to predict whether the price of a queried ticket is set to rise or fall—similar to what Bing Travel (formerly Farecast) does for flight tickets. If the price is expected to go down, users can sign up to receive a free email alert when it’s at rock bottom. Seat Geek also scours the web in for the best deals at any moment, linking to affiliated ticket merchants like StubHub, RazorGator and eBay. Seat Geek’s patent-pending algorithm draws on a large pool of data that includes millions of historical ticket transactions. This data is crunched together with other factors, such as, for baseball games: team statistics, the weather, the venue, the price-level of the seat—even who’ll be pitching. According to SeatGeek co-founder Jack Groetzinger, the algorithm is accurate 80% of the time, and it’s also self-training, meaning it gets better every day. As our sister-site explains in its latest briefing, consumers increasingly expect instant gratification. Seat Geek and other ‘prediction engines’ take that one step further, by drawing on the web’s informational riches to tell consumers how things will be, enabling them to make better decisions now. The future has never been as near, and opportunities abound for entrepreneurs that can bring it even closer. (Related: Zigabid ticketing marketplace — Real-time pricing error alerts for consumers to pounce on.) Spotted by: Cecilia Biemann